Okay, okay – so some of you won’t know what I’m on about, and some of you will – but I’ll explain.

I have just recently acquired and set up… wait for it… another machine.

This is probably not that surprising – but what might be surprising to people who know me is that this machine is a Mac. A PowerMac G5 2.5GHz Quad Core: the last of the G5s, in fact.

I’m a big fan of Mad Max – at least, the firsttwo films anyway – so upon hearing myself say to Clare that it was “the last of the G5s”, I immediately thought of that great piece of dialogue referring to the iconic black Pursuit Special in the first film.

I love the naming process for new acquisitions, and I always try to think of something that is in some way apt; thus, the obvious choice for a name had become clear – the Pursuit Special.

After sticking in as much PC2 4200 DDR RAM as I have spare (5GB), I’ve given it fresh install and updated it to OS X 10.5.8 which is the highest version PPC based Macs can handle. I’m currently pissing about with SSH access and tunnelling VNC protocols, and have it set up in such a way that I can use Wake On Lan via the Internets to remotely wake it up using this great utility, which is fun. Sweet magic packets. I’ve gotten hold of a few nice free utilities, plus a nice chap has given me a paid copy of TechTool Pro which comes with the AppleCare support plan. I also plan to put in a second-hand airport card if I can get my hands on one for a few quid.

Of course, this is not entirely necessary as it has a wired gigabit connection, but I want to pimp it out as much as possible. It’s an old machine and has undoubtedly been worked very hard during its life, but despite this I want to make the best of it. No point having a Mac if I’m not going to soup it up as much as possible, right? Just like the (real) Pursuit Special.

As I have previously written, I currently dual-boot my netbook into Ubuntu and WinXP. The point really of all these OS shenanigans is that I need to work on my Mac and Linux/UNIX skills. OS X uses Darwin as the UNIX underbelly of the beast, so ever the fan of the humble CLI, I hope that it will help me with both in a sort of two-pronged learning attack. I’ve been working more and more with the Macs at work in an attempt to become the sort of go-to guy for Mac support, as previously it’s always been a hole in my knowledge. My career in standard Windows desktop support looks increasingly bleak, so it’s high time I did something about that.

Being a geek is sweet. I get really excited about often quite simple stuff, and moreover stuff that most other people really don’t care about. This usually prompts me to start some sort of techy project, but, alas, I’m the first to admit they go on a seemingly never-ending, possibly never-completed wishlist. I’d like to change that, and I reckon blogging about stuff might just give me more impetus to make good on my thoughts – if not less time to do them. Irony.

Anyway with that in mind, here’s a couple of mini projects I have on my mind, some in various stages of completion, some merely seeded. Hopefully I’ll do something about them, if I haven’t already.

Reappropriating a LaCie FireWire CD-RW

This little project is now complete, and although really quite simple in the end, it was exactly the kind of thing I love doing. You can read the full post about the process here.

Telescope Refurb

As per my previous post, I’ve been donated an old Charles Frank 6″ Reflector telescope, which needs a little work. I find any sort of techy work really fun, but don’t get as much opportunity to do much other than computer work, and even that is more limited than I like. This should be a fun little project, once I’ve persuaded my parents to ferry it 200 miles form its current location to my house.

Fitting a hard drive to my old Amiga 600

I’d been thinking about cracking out theCommodore Amiga 600 I’ve owned since being a kid and never got rid of (I still have all the disks!) at some point, possibly looking into a few things I could do to it upgrades wise. I always, always wanted a hard drive for it when I was younger (it was something like 100mb, I think, and external), so I had a little delve. Fortunately for me, it turns out there’s actually a hard drive bracket and IDE connector for a 2.5″ IDE hard drive, ready and waiting inside the thing. Bonus. Thanks to some fantastic resources such as Amiga.org, The Extreme Commodore A600 Upgrading Page and English Amiga Board I’ve prepared an old 1.2gb drive I had kicking around using the awesome but complicated WinUAE and a nice preconfigured Workbench setup called Classic Workbench and now I’m just waiting for the 2.5″ IDE cable, which is taking approximately 17 years to arrive.

[UPDATE: Between writing this bit and posting, the IDE cable arrived – it’s now installed and working. I will write a post about the whole thing soon]

Finding a purpose for new kit

I’ve just acquired a Dell Poweredge 1750blade server, plus a really gorgeous, well-engineered case with an Intel SE7505VB2 motherboard and dual Intel Xeon 2.4gHz chips, either Prestonia or Gallatin flavour, and I need a purpose for them. I probably need to get a bit of thermal paste for the processors, as the heatsinks had been removed and although I did my best with the paste that was left on, one of the chips is running a good 5°C hotter. I’m really not a fan (heh heh) of re-using paste anyway, it’s not exactly expensive stuff.

Building a home-made NAS

Easier than you think. I’ve come across a lovely Linux distro called FreeNAS which is brilliant. Extremely easy to install, can live on a bootable memory stick and after a minimum of setup, you can configure the whole thing through a web interface. I’m not really sure why they have a little devil thingy on their logo.

Unfortunately, I’m now of the opinion it might have to wait. Realistically, I can’t really house another box. I’m up to my eyeballs in tech – but then again, I am a kit monster!

Setting up an OSX Server

I acquired a Mac XServe G5 blade some time ago and have been looking for something to do with it. Lovely piece of kit, really just bit too nice to get thrown away. I’ve been thinking of getting some sort of internal web server up and running, at some point – this may be the ideal candidate.

Setting up a Windows Server

See above. Most likely on the Dell, I think. I want to play with/learn Microsoft’s WDS for work, and this would be a great opportunity. I have a couple of spare machines kicking around to act as client machines as well, so I can get the hang of it.

Hackint0shing my Samsung NC10

The original section I started writing hereturned into a massive rant/homage to my Samsung NC10 netbook so I ‘ve actually split it off into a new post here. Anyway basically at some point I plan to hackint0sh it. For those of you who don’t know what I’m on about, it means to install Mac OSX on a computer not normally supposed to run it – i.e. not a Mac. Although it’s strictly speaking a bit naughty, I actually own various genuine copies of OSX, so it could be worse.

I’ve done it before to an old Dell, and the principle is the same, so it shouldn’t be too hard. The major issue was that the wifi/network adaptors will not work once OSX is on there, which makes it pretty pointless, but I’ve fixed that by buying and installing a Dell wifi card, which is compatible with OSX.